Designer refashions surplus fabric waste into online store, creating cash flow for small brands

by Admin
August 4, 2024

As Courtney Holm scoured warehouses for fabric to create garments for her sustainable fashion label, she was struck by the enormous scale of excess material in Australia.

“I would go out to these different places, and I would see all of this surplus material,” Ms Holm said.

“You go to a bigger factory, or you go to a mill, and you see a warehouse full of it.

“And it’s just quite shocking that this material wasn’t getting used.”

Courtney Holm helps sell fabric sitting idle in factories and warehouses.(Supplied: Courtney Holm)

After years of wondering how to make this resource available to those who could use it, she thought: “What if someone digitised everything and put this onto one platform?”

When no-one did, Ms Holm applied for a grant from the Victorian government’s Circular Economy Business Innovation Centre, which funds projects that prevent products from going to waste.

“Basically that was the kick-starter for us to actually build a platform and to test it to see what people were actually looking for from a buying perspective, as well as the people that are holding the surplus, what were their needs?” she told ABC Radio Perth.

“The pilot went so well that we decided to turn it into a business,” she said.

The fabric is cut in Melbourne and sent on to buyers. (Supplied: Courtney Holm)

That business, Melbourne-based Circular Sourcing, is now so successful that Ms Holm is winding down her fashion label to focus on it full time.

Unseen fashion waste

While much of the focus on fashion waste is on the fast-fashion industry and the quantity of clothing that is discarded each year, unused fabric is also a big, although far less visible, problem.

“It’s around $210 billion of [global, annual] value that is not being necessarily claimed back from those materials,” Ms Holm said.

“So there’s an economic and a sustainability push for this to be solved.”

Fast fashion has contributed to more fabric ending up in landfill.(Getty: Ziga Plahutar)

There are varied reasons for why garment manufacturers create so much surplus fabric.

Ms Holm said many mills had large minimum order requirements, of 500 or 1,000 metres or more, which forced companies to order more material than they actually needed.

“A lot of the time, the machinery that is utilised to create fabrics and materials can only produce a certain amount. They’re built for volume,” she said.

In some cases the excess might be because mills don’t sell as much from a production run as expected.

“No-one’s trying to overproduce because it’s expensive to overproduce,” Ms Holm said.

‘Anybody can use it’

At Circular Sourcing, surplus material is listed for sale, either by the metre or by the roll, depending on the sellers’ preference, and anyone, from home-sewing enthusiasts to other fashion brands or designers, can buy the fabric.

“If you are just interested in working with small amounts of material, or you just want to make something for yourself at home, we don’t have any rules around who can actually purchase on the platform,” Ms Holm said.

Rolls of fabric stacked on a shelf at Circular Sourcing.(Supplied: Courtney Holm)

Despite initial fears that some labels might not want to sell their excess stock to the public, especially material with distinctive prints, Ms Holm said that wasn’t the case, and most wanted their fabric to be put to good use.

“I think that’s such an interesting sign that things have changed,” she said.

“There is a shift towards sustainability being prioritised in businesses, and using surplus is a big part of that.”

For home sewers, she said, it was an opportunity to buy high-quality, often made-to-order, fabric that wasn’t available for sale at other fabric retailers.

“[Online] they can see what the fabric is, where it came from. If there’s provenance information that all gets captured as well,” Ms Holm said.

Cash flow for small business

Jillian Boustred, who founded her eponymous small Sydney-based fashion label in 2016, is one of many designers now able to sell her excess fabric through Ms Holm’s website.

“Previously we were dealing with approximately 50 to 100 metres of surplus fabric a season, which is quite small compared to other brands, however it is still waste and fabric that is in perfectly good condition — looking for a new home,” Ms Boustred said.

Designer Jillian Boustred says the ability to sell surplus fabric has created a new revenue stream for her business.(Supplied: Jillian Boustred)

She said that as well as reducing waste, selling the excess fabric had created an extra revenue stream for her small business.

“It has essentially allowed us to turn what was waste into a form of cashflow,” she said.

Manufacturing company MTK Australia’s Stephen Morris-Moody said that before he had the opportunity to sell surplus material through Circular Sourcing, up to 1,000 metres of the company’s knit fabrics went unsold each year.

Stephen Morris-Moody, right, at Melbourne Textiles Knitting.(ABC News: Ashlynne McGhee)

“It’s made a big difference,” he said.

“[It’s helped] us recoup some of our development costs as well as keeping the fabrics in circulation and not going to landfill.”

He said the machines used in the manufacturing process often led to excess fabric being produced.

“As we are a manufacturer we are governed by the machinery that dyes and finishes the fabric,” he said. “One of these machines is 50 metres long, so that is the minimum we can produce.”